Several adult children of same sex households are starting to speak up about the wounds children have when deliberately deprived of one of their parents, and why they oppose same sex marriage. One such person is Katy Faust. She’s an engaging, compassionate, brave, and loving voice for the rights of children to know their origins. Listen to her speak in the clip below:

Katy’s open letter to Justice Anthony Kennedy which was published at The Public Discourse last month got nearly 300,000 shares on social media so far. You can follow Katy’s amazing blog, which goes by the tongue-in-cheek name www.askthebigot.com In this clip Katy talks about how important it is — especially as Christians — to straddle a fence. We should not cocoon ourselves, but must reach out in love to the other side while holding fast to the Truth. This may be very difficult, but it is our calling. After listening to Katy, I feel the need to strike a more conciliary tone in my writing. I want to always hold fast to the truth, but I do need to delve more into understanding and conveying the pain people feel. And the loneliness. Our human condition so often motivates us to stray and get lost and end up feeling that only hate is coming from “the other side.”

Nevertheless, the mechanics of the same sex marriage campaign has been essentially political in nature. It will reach a political apex in April’s Supreme Court hearings, which will determine if it is the law of the land. In the past couple of years a few blue state legislatures legalized same sex marriage after hearing testimonies about how hurt people felt by the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Still, it was a close call. In New York in 2011 Gov. Cuomo had to resort to late night back room deals and extend the session after official adjournment. There was obviously a lot of arm twisting until he managed to get the three votes he wanted. A very similar thing happened in Maryland with Gov. O’Malley in 2012. He also worked overtime to get the three votes he wanted. Then, after just a few legislatures passed the measures by the thinnest of margins, activist judges sprang into action to strike down laws in every state whose legislatures hadn’t passed same sex marriage. And that’s where we are today.

Emotions have basically been the fuel of what looks to be window-of-opportunity politics. Real societal change naturally occurs over time, as people absorb and think through the consequences of policies. But when it moves at lightning speed like this, from the top down — along with speech codes that punish any dissent as “bigotry” — that’s a clear indicator that you’re dealing with manufactured consent that has an expiration date. It can be obtained only under extreme pressure. Basically “marriage equality” has been a hard core propaganda campaign and a very hard and fast sell. An excellent article that reflects on it all is “Gay Marriage: A Case Study in Conformism” by Brendan O’Neill in the British publication Spiked. This goes way beyond gay marriage. It seems that what we’re really dealing with here is the building of a closed society in which dissent will not be tolerated. But, no matter what happens, I think Katy has the answer.

This month six adult children from same sex households are submitting an amicus brief to the Supreme Court opposing same sex marriage. Two of them — Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman — have co-authored/edited a just released book which explores the fallout from the social experimentation we are all living through. Please click here and “look inside” the text of Jephthah’s Daughters at Amazon. I hope you decide to buy a copy.

The book is a rich anthology of articles and testimonials that describe experiences not discussed in the media. According to Lopez, “We can help the reader understand why something viewed by so many as beneficial was actually harmful to so many more.”

I am honored to be a contributor, having written the introduction to the chapters on society and the globe. There are six sections in the book. The first, “Children,” explores the experiences of children who are separated from at least one natural parent. This can happen in many different ways, but children of same sex households are separated from a parent by design. Alana Newman who blogs at AnonymousUs.org was donor-conceived and wrote the introduction to this section.

Section III “Society,” reviews the whole Pandora’s box that same sex marriage is unleashing against healthy human relationships, against children, and against freedom. Some of the vehicles are transgenderism, polygamy, incest, and sex education as a means of state control of children. Section IV, “Globe,” discusses the emergence of the LGBT ideology throughout the world and what the growing commodifying of children means for human freedom (hint: a form of bondage, a form of slavery.) Yours truly wrote the introduction, and I suppose the bottom line I can’t escape is that this movement is putting us on the fast track to centralized power, and probably on a global scale. In many ways, it’s a central planner’s dream come true.

Section V, entitled “Gays” includes reflections by those whom the LGBT movement claims to help, but does not. Jean-Pier Delaume-Myard notes in his introduction that the LGBT agenda actually leads to inequality for gays, not equality.

Section VI, “Bards” explores the McCarthyism of the LGBT agenda — in the arts, the media, academia and throughout society. Its introduction is written by Michelle Shocked, a world-renowned singer-songwriter twice nominated for Grammy awards. She asks: “How did a crusader for children’s rights become the target of a smear campaign? Answer: The same way a champion for artists rights did. By identifying the nexus of non-existent nonsense that is much easier to attach ad hominem to than the question at hand.”

This is an extremely important book with perspectives that have been overlooked — and, in fact, blocked — throughout the entire debate on marriage. Bobby Lopez founded the International Children’s Rights Institute because, at root, his fight is really about the rights of children. Children have the right to know their origins. And nobody has the right to turn them into commodities.

Propaganda often seems to start with a Potemkin Village. The Wikipedia definition of Potemkin Village happens to be pithy: “a fake village built only to impress.” It’s a facade that masks a false reality with an attractive illusion. Today we have “SuperTrans” figures cherry picked by Hollywood to present a impressive picture of transgenderism, to promote it particularly for kids and steer them down the rabbit hole of “gender identity.” Below you’ll see a clip of one of the daytime talk drones, Katie Couric, interviewing a transgender homecoming queen.

The idea here is to destabilize the audience’s sense of reality by presenting a very female looking person with male DNA. Nevermind that just a tiny fraction of less than one percent of the population might identify as transgender. (From the Hollywood juggernaut, you’d think it was something like 25 percent of the general population.) And nevermind that sex change regret is so real that 90 percent of all transgenders are lost to medical follow up.

So is Couric talking to just an ordinary teen-ager from an ordinary family? Don’t kid yourself. This looks like a “Ryland” situation, i.e., another fantasyland poster family for transgenderism. The youtube video for the child Ryland Whittington is a professional production. And so is this Couric number. The LGBT lobby is extremely well-monied with a huge power agenda that serves to cultivate gender dysphoria, particularly in kids. The parents who have signed on with it get loads of accolades and support. Those who don’t — like Joshua/Leelah Alcorn’s parents — are pilloried with threats to remove the child from the home. In any event, it’s very difficult for vulnerable children who look at this seemingly perfect situation and let their imaginations — and whatever past hurts they harbor — trigger them into believing that they were perhaps always the opposite sex inside. Plus, if they go along with it, they are protected thru the “anti-bullying” agendas that, incidentally, were developed to protect only LGBT kids and virtually nobody else.

The parents who are enabling this agenda have — for whatever reason — bought into the hype. Their message to all other parents and all other children is this: if you don’t reject the physical reality of sex, you can expect to be attacked and vilified in the public square. According to them, your existence as either male or female is all in your mind. Couric and Oprah Winfrey have taken on the mission of pouring this PC kool-aid down the throats of all Americans.

What we have here is a Potemkin Village interview. It’s meant to show a facade of the Trans-Agenda, implying: “Gee, if only kids could be given hormone blockers so that their bodies don’t develop in puberty, then wow, they can look more like the sex they claim to want to be. Everyone should let go of their doubts and drink up this koolaid. Doubt, by the way, is the equivalent of ‘hate.'”

Below is an Oprah Winfrey propaganda clip from about five years ago. In it she interviews transgender supermodel Lea T. The idea was to promote and glamorize sex reassignment surgery. Today a primary goal of the transgender lobby is to push hard to get everyone to accept the transitioning of children. Before that, the focus was primarily on adults. We can look back and see Oprah working to soften the ground here, as always prodding us to align our attitudes and beliefs with hers:

Of course, we’ve reached a new stage in the propaganda war to force feed transgender ideology to America at large. Last night the TV series “Transparent” won several awards at the Golden Globe Awards. The series centers around a family in which the father comes out as transgender. Audiences undergo a lot of emotional manipulation and emotional blackmail in this sort of propaganda.

My Friday Federalist piece on Leelah’s Law was about the transgender lobby’s exploitation of a teen’s suicide to push their agenda a whole lot harder. The proposed law would essentially criminalize any counseling and psychotherapy that does not affirm transgenderism, and any parent who did not get with the Trans program would be guilty by association. Of course it uses the catchphrase “conversion therapy” to imply that this only applies to one type of therapy. It doesn’t. You can read my article here: “Leelah’s Law is Bad Law and Bad Medicine.”

The message behind the proposed law is that if you do not accept the ideology of transgenderism, you are morally responsible for any suicide of a transgender child who does not feel accepted.

I think there are at least five factors that make the onslaught of transgender propaganda different from other types of propaganda in the past.

1. It seems far more organized, focused, faster-and-more-furious than any propaganda campaign in history. (Which means it can’t withstand much scrutiny.)

2. It requires more than ever that the bystander reject physical reality in order to accommodate ever-shifting perceptions of others. This is huge. It comes with the territory that such laws require us to reject our own physical reality and question our own “gender identity.”

3. Under the phony guise of “anti-bullying” this type of propaganda exploits children and their peers as never before –physically, emotionally, and mentally.

4. The scope of the endgame is enormous: to legally and universally impose upon every human being a new definition — or rather, a non-definition — of what it means to be human.

(Even if for the moment it seems like everybody simply has the “freedom” to identify as one wishes, that’s not sustainable. Because ultimately, the ideology of transgenderism rejects biology. It’s already begun to erase everybody’s legal identity as either male or female simply by writing into law the presumption that your sex is merely “assigned at birth.”)

5. It serves to abolish the family. When male and female are eliminated as legal categories, it goes without saying that “mother” and “father” must also be eliminated as legal categories, along with any inherent right to a relationship with your biological children. That’s the logical path transgender propaganda leads us down.

Unfortunately, we live in an age in which we are compelled to point out the obvious because so many have become detached from physical reality, including folks who are just plain tired and wish to bury their head in the sand hoping it will all go away. It won’t go away on its own. We need to confront assaults on reality and common sense whenever they’re imposed on us. Otherwise we end up in the Twilight Zone. Down the rabbit hole. And the world will just keep getting more surreal and less healthy for us and our children.

The MSHSL plans to vote on this policy on Thursday morning, December 4 at 9:30. The place is the MSHSL Board Room at 2100 Freeway Blvd., Brooklyn Center, MN You can get more details by clicking here. If you are concerned about it and in the area, it’s definitely worth showing up, perhaps with a sign or placard to express opposition.

The other side — flush with cash and media support — has always depended on projecting a manufactured illusion of support, always way disproportionate to any actual level of public support. Be prepared for that.

In my article, I list 12 reasons why the MSHSL is a terrible idea (for those who need to hear them):

It’s totally anti-privacy.

It drives children to consider physically unhealthy and drastic, irreversible options.

It encourages children to reject their bodies and discourages children from accepting their bodies.

You may have come here from Drudge Report today, which linked to my Federalist article Trouble in Transtopia. So this seems like a good time to post again. This time, a few words about physicians.

John Money (1921-2006) is perhaps the doctor most responsible for promoting the idea of surgical sex changes. He was widely known as a pioneering sexologist, and was responsible for founding of the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins University. Below is a documentary of Money’s most famous case today, the tragedy of David Reimer.

Money was so passionate about his gender identity theory, that he jumped at the chance to put it into practice on a baby. David Reimer (born Bruce, 1965-2002) was an identical twin whose penis was destroyed by a botched circumcision. Money convinced David’s parents to raise him as a girl. It didn’t work and the story is thoroughly tragic. Biology trumped the social experiment, as biology always does in the end. Dr. Money had kept pushing for surgery to construct a vagina, but David (“Brenda”) resisted, and his parents decided to stop seeing Dr. Money. They soon after told him he was a boy. At that point, by the time he was 14, David then dropped all of the charades Money foisted upon him. But before he was 40, he committed suicide. You can read David’s story in John Colapinto’s 2001 book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who was Raised as a Girl.

There are physicians who are skeptical of such blind passion for gender reassignment surgery, though you wouldn’t know it as you watch the transgender project go into media hyperdrive these days. One of the skeptics is Dr. Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist responsible for shutting down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1979.

McHugh wrote about his experiences at Johns Hopkins in a 2004 First Things article entitled “Sexual Surgery,” and then recently reiterated his arguments in an op-ed this past summer in the Wall Street Journal. If you’re interested in this topic, it’s worth checking those links. Here’s an excerpt:

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

In Britain, Az Hakeem was almost as concerned as McHugh, writing in a 2007 article entitled “Trans-sexuality: A Case of the Emperor’s New Clothes,” that transgenderism was a “delusional disorder.” Having come under extraordinary pressure from trans advocates, Hakeem has pretty much recanted that view since then. Nevertheless, he apparently still runs a psychotherapy program in a clinic that allows those who are pondering surgery to speak in a group setting with post-operative patients who express regret about their decisions. In this way, he hopes to make sure that anyone considering surgery has a chance to talk it through as much as possible before making irreversible life-altering decisions to refashion or remove healthy body parts. In reading Hakeem’s website, particularly the FAQs, it’s clear that he is hyper-sensitive to the concerns of transgender activists who have in the past called him “transphobic.”

Since the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association both seem to work in lockstep with the transgender lobby today, they will likely continue to place increasing pressure to silence and discredit any psychiatrist who questions surgical sex, as does Paul McHugh. If they have their way, you’ll likely see the story of David Reimer get suppressed and then see social experimenter John Money get resurrected as some kind of a hero. In the meantime, more psychiatrists like Az Hakeem will be nudged and pressured to get with the trans program.

It’s fantastic to see the subject of sex change regret getting exposure on a high traffic site like Drudge. A sense of confusion about one’s body is no doubt a horrid thing for anyone to have to go through. But how much worse it must be if you went ahead with irreversible elective surgery like that and then lived to regret it? And some regret it immediately after surgery. It must be absolutely devastating, no matter the begging and the consent that may have preceded it all.

And though we’ve been led to believe that it’s “rare,” it’s such a horrid thing that people should be allowed to discuss it, no matter how rare. But I suspect it is not as rare as we’ve been led to believe. Because as far as the transgender lobby is concerned, such things are not supposed to be discussed in public. And since the trans-agenda is protected through most media outlets, through Hollywood, and through academia, there are precious few places to find opposing views. In fact, other points of view tend to be squashed on internet forums too, as I discuss in my article. So there are plenty of roadblocks to knowing what’s really out there. I suspect there’s much festering beneath the surface.

I don’t think “gender identity dysphoria” is being effectively treated at all. (Did I hear that right from this confused young man when he recalls how he felt the need to “get [his] boobs”?) No, surgery and hormones don’t “treat” this condition. The condition is being cultivated. The media and Hollywood are cultivating it and seem blithely unconcerned about any of the underlying psychological reasons for it. Individuals who are being hyped as examples — increasingly children — are being used as guinea pigs in a social experiment in which we are all, in fact, subjects.

Let’s think this through. Transgender law requires that we all accept the false premise that our sex was “assigned” to us at birth. Not identified, but “assigned.” In other words, your biological maleness or femaleness is not real. According to this scheme, your physical sex is simply in your head. When what’s in your head doesn’t “match” your genitalia, that’s called gender identity dysphoria. When it “matches,” well there’s a fairly new and highly weaponized word for that: “cisgender” which simply means you accept your body as is and don’t perseverate about your biological sex. In the trans scheme of things being “cisgender” means you are “privileged.” Hence, the laws about everybody’s sexual identity (through the catchphrase “assigned at birth”) must be changed for the sake of “equality.”

If this is written into law across the board — and it already has been in many states and municipalities — we will eventually have no choice but to discard our sex as a legal distinction of who we are. Each and every one of us. The implications are vast for legal recognition of motherhood, fatherhood, childhood, families, and, in fact, all human relationships.

The gender dysphoria craze illustrates the depths of dysfunction that our society has fallen into.

To begin with, it’s a grand fallacy to try to get the world to go along with an internal perception of who you think you are when that perception conflicts so directly with physical reality. But the main fault lies with a tiny elite who are intent on enforcing the notion that human biology is meaningless, and that sex differences ought to be erased. The snake oil of gender identity is the vehicle by which our biological differences are written out of law. In that way mothers and fathers are written out of law, as is the family. This does great violence to children.

And, in the meantime, it does great violence to those who bought the snake oil, used it, and then woke up to find themselves physically and psychologically mutilated. As did Alan Finch.

“transsexualism was invented by psychiatrists . . . You fundamentally can’t change sex . . . the surgery doesn’t alter you genetically. It’s genital mutilation. My ‘vagina’ was just the bag of my scrotum. It’s like a pouch, like a kangaroo. What’s scary is you still feel like you have a penis when you’re sexually aroused. It’s like phantom limb syndrome. It’s all been a terrible misadventure. I’ve never been a woman, just Alan . . . the analogy I use about giving surgery to someone desperate to change sex is it’s a bit like offering liposuction to an anorexic.”

Alan went on to sue the Australian gender identity clinic, at Melbourne’s Monash Medical Center, for misdiagnosis. The reaction from the transgender community was fast and furious and abusive, particularly in the Susans.org discussion forum.

Next time, I’ll provide a couple of links on what some physicians have to say.

This is how everybody happens, whether they like it or not: the union of one male and one female. Lest we forget: every male and female and intersex person happens this way, and that would include all individuals who call themselves transgender.

To answer to the question “What is a human?” for the purpose of this blog series, we need only refer to the simple and existential question of the child: “Where did I come from?”

A human being is a creature who is born out of the union of one male human being and one female human being. This is true for every man, woman or child who has ever been conceived, whether male, female, or ambiguous/intersex. Transgender persons may wish to deny this, but their own humanity is based in their origins of one male united with one female. Whether we know our biological parents or not, they are how we came into being. Whether it happens in a bed or a petri dish doesn’t matter.

A human being may present as the opposite sex or as a sexless being or both sexes or genders or as many as they imagine, but it doesn’t change the reality of their humanity. Nor anybody else’s.

The transgender activists’ idea that a person may identify as male or female regardless of biological sex is nothing new. There are plenty of famous cases in history and literature. The idea of androgyny — the male/female being — is an old concept that goes back to ancient times.

Here’s what’s new: The attempt to force onto everybody the transgender idea of human identity, and the push to codify it as quickly as possible into law under the guise of “non-discrimination.” The key phrase slipped into these laws is that our sex is merely “assigned” to us at birth. If we accept that premise, then we will certainly reach a point at which nobody can be legally identified as either male or female. Eventually, we all become “other” in the eyes of the state.

How are we supposed to understand our origins in this scheme? Answer: It looks like we’re not intended to understand our origins. Nor, ironically, are we supposed to chart our own destiny in this vacuum of ambiguity. It’s a destabilizing prospect, but that’s where we’re headed with this. The transgender movement has less to do with equal rights than it has to do with a war on language, aimed directly at destabilizing our sense of human identity.